This module will offer a general overview on some poetical productions from the 1960s to contemporary writing. It will insist on some of the major English-language areas, such as South Africa, Ireland and Scotland, and on writers such as Douglas Livingstone, Seamus Heaney and Norman MacCaig. It will offer an eco-critical approach to their works, underlining how their “sense of place” and their poetic and political preoccupations were very much close to and influenced by a high sense of engagement with their environment. A special attention will be dedicated to those texts which have spoken out about the environment and climate crises and about some of the major abuses and violences against our Planet.
In particular, Douglas Livingstone was a microbiologist who tested the Indian Ocean every day to investigate pollution and water compositions and variations along 26 different spots (“sampling stations”), writing his last book, A Littoral Zone, on humanity’s physical and psychic elements. Seamus Heaney, often defined as “the poet archaeologist”, since his “bog poems” has investigated the life on the surface of the Irish soil (but also its depths and secrets), had been faithful to a special idea of his “sense of place”. Norman MacCaig, one of the main protagonist of Scottish contemporary poetry, had often spent his summers in the Highlands (Sutherland/Assynt), writing hundreds of poems inspired not only by his love for that landscape but also by the various violences, colonizations, transformations and appropriations of that land.
This module will approach poetical texts from various eco-critical angles, showing how the beautiful and dramatic value of those poetical English-language poems can work as glaring lighthouses in the storm of our contemporary times.